Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

How many to write, that is the question. Will I still be writing these as my ashes are funneled into the urn? I want to be obliged to write enough of them so I am forced to deal with personal stuff beyond my comfort.

My association with an old friend, the sculptor Charles Ross, urged me towards the number 137. He was making some works that explored this number. For one series of pieces he arranged a Fresnel lens that focuses the heat of the sun onto eight-inch squares of brightly painted wood. The burns last eight minutes and nineteen seconds, the duration of the passage of a photon between the earth and the sun. He does this 137 times on sets of 137 squares of wood, each set painted a different intense color. The completed works have an undeniable, inexplicable power and beauty. 137.n (the resolution of the decimal is agreed on to about ten digits) is the Fine Structure Constant, or Alpha (a). Some physicists call it “God’s Number.” It figures as a ratio in all transactions between light and matter. 1/137 is the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon. It is mysterious, the physicists say, because unlike pi or Planck’s constant, it is dimensionless, not a result of measurement. It is a prime number that asserts itself out of the void of creation, a number on which all manifestation depends. Richard Feynman was fond of the number. He is said to have confronted prize-winning physicists who strut around conferences with the remark, “You think you’ve got it figured out, what about 137?” Werner Heisenberg stated that once we understand 137 the problems of quantum mechanics will disappear. 137 is the most important number of the Kabbalah. Try to figure this out. In natural sequences that arrange themselves according to the Fibonacci series, like the whorls of the sunflower, or the conch or snail shell, the angle between one level and another is almost always 137°. The great physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, friend of Heisenberg and Jung, spent a good deal of his later life obsessed with 137. He died in a hospital in Zurich in room 137. My huge handicap is that I don’t know how to read the material in the language of mathematics or physics, but it is energizing to take a poetic or metaphorical poke at it. I like to infer with what little I understand that there is always part of what we look at that is in the dark, and ineluctable. There is the darkness in everything manifest. It insures the imperfect that is our paradise. Look at Psalm 137, the opening of which Bob Marley sings with such tender inspiration. The last verses of this psalm advocate infanticide.

Why not make 137.n of these Memoirrhoids ? 137.n allows for all manifestation, my manifestation, thank you. I represent the anthropomorphic theories plaguing the quantum physicists. For practice I wrote one piece, a meditation of 137 lines, that I published in the New Review of Literature , out of the Otis College of Design in Los Angeles. I scribbled that work at an apartment on the beach I owned at one time with my friend Julie Rubsam. It was in a high-rise in Punta Negra, on Banderas Bay, south of Puerto Vallarta. After the struggle we had to buy it, we learned that the Mexican government owns everything 60 meters from the high water mark. The beach below the building was eroding away. We hadn’t been told that the Mexican government owned us into the dining room. Even if the building built a breakwater that pushed the beach out again, we were screwed. We’d have to buy the land back from the government. The more the reality of owning the place was revealed, the more expensive it got. We had to sell and were lucky that it sold. It had been lovely for a time to sit on the balcony of this top floor apartment looking over Banderas Bay, and to watch the pelicans muster at evening and fly by the eaves of the building in long files of pelican. And during the day fishermen in the sun cast their nets across schools of silver fish that flashed like coins. The tourist plague in Puerto Vallarta made me nuts. Every day two or three huge cruise ships emptied their bilges of drunken gringo regulars onto the streets to spend money, and throw up. I was usually on my lonesome down there. I stayed on the balcony and read. One way I read was to count words. I counted each 137th word 137 times from the beginning of the book, and took the word before and the word after each 137th to make a phrase. I did this with several books, then stacked the extracted words into a vertical totem. It seemed nothing remarkable until I did this operation on Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude . I was startled, amazed, even gratified when the 137th 137 out of that book read “all useless art.”

Here we are at a nice little party, somewhere on the East Side way up in the fifties. The only difference from other parties I rarely go to is that this one is being thrown for me. I sit on a couch holding a tumbler of single malt, maybe Glenlivet, on the rocks. I try to relax between Robert Crumb and another protoluminary. I’m expected to become one myself. “I’ve never felt comfortable at this kind of party,” I say.

“Comfortable?” R. Crumb says. “I don’t feel comfortable at parties, or anywhere else. I don’t feel comfortable at home.” That’s the one exchange I ever have in my life with R. Crumb, a man almost painfully honest about himself, whom I admire a lot as an artist. His registering in drawings of the feel and characters of the Sixties is equal to Honoré Daumier or James Gillray in their times.

This party is a celebration of The Exagggerations Of Peter Prince , my novel published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Few people from Holt are present. It’s a Random House party, at the apartment of Christopher Cerf, Bennet Cerf’s son. I realize I’m being traded to Random House. Random House is still a small, friendly publisher that occupies half a landmark building on Madison Avenue in the Thirties, the other half occupied by the Catholic Archdiocese. Chris Cerf is planning to pluck me from Holt, into the Random House fold. I am clueless about how rare and privileged my position is. Ten or fifteen years later this would be sealed with a big advance. Now it’s done with an Uptown party.

Holt invested a lot of energy and money in Peter Prince . Arthur Cohen, who was Vice President and editor in chief, the man who founded Meridian Books, the first paperback publisher in the US, went way out on a limb to agree to buy and publish this strange manuscript. I grab the advance and leave for Istanbul, for Israel to see my friend Hal Schimmel, for Italy, trusting that the book is in professional hands. I’m taking license to do this, leaving wife and family for travel. While I am gone, Holt is absorbed by CBS, and Arthur Cohen is fired for keeping a boyfriend on the payroll. I can’t believe a vice president and editor in chief can be fired. Arthur’s friend is quite a pretty boy, and has even done a lot of work for his money. Bob Cornfield takes over the editing and by the time I get back the book is already in blues, about to be printed. They have screwed up the layout and graphics that are totally integral to the book. Too many six martini lunches. I tell Bob Cornfield I can’t allow it to be published this way, and though it is ready to go to press, Cornfield manages to get a lot of it redone with my closer supervision. It comes out on schedule in September. The book gets some big attention, a three page review in the Times , written by R.V. Cassill, with pictures of some of its graphic pages. Cassill totally trashes it, and even takes a swat at it two weeks later when he reviews a different book, though when I meet him a couple of years later in Oregon he tells me how much he loves my work. Holt buys several pages of advertising in The Saturday Review Of Literature . I’m on my way. I’m ready to put on the gloves with Norman Mailer. Someone in the post-literate offices of CBS has other thoughts, and they nix it in the Xmas catalog. They don’t even offer my Peter Prince for sale at Christmas. I feel orphaned.